Researchers have used computers to scan aerial photographs and conduct the world's first automated mass-crowd count.
Researchers at the University of Central Florida said that counting large-scale crowds has been a long, tedious process involving people examining aerial photographs one at a time.
Until now, each photograph had to be divided into sections and the examiners counted the number of heads per inch.
But now, UCF's Center for Research in Computer Vision has created software that promises to automate the process and cut down the time dramatically, from up to a week to 30 minutes, giving organisers critical information when planning for events or responding to emergencies.
The software was tested in September. Thousands of demonstrators along a 5 km stretch of Barcelona were calling for the independence of the Catalonia province from Spain. Using the new software, 67 aerial images of different sections were analysed.
The software programme came up with a total count for each of the images within 30 minutes. The images and calculations were then sent to Pompeu Fabra University in Spain, where statistics professor Albert Satorra led a team in reviewing the data.
Using UCF results for the images, they concluded the count for the entire crowd at about 530,000.
"Automated computer analysis of such large-scale and dense crowds has never been done before," said Mubarak Shah, computer science professor and director of the center.
"We will continue to push the envelope of state-of-the-art in-crowd analysis so that it can by help the authorities and governments manage real-time safety of large crowds and perform post-event analysis of such gatherings," Shah said.
